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An expanse of jagged lava rock known as El Playon is the sepulcher for an unknown number of slaughtered Salvadoran civilians.

Where the vehicle tracks emerge from the high weeds about 100 yards from the paved road, three skulls, one with a bullet hole in the forehead, rest upright near the decaying rot of food, plastic, tin cans and soda bottles, for El Playon is also a dump for garbage.

A walk across the hardened lava reveals pockets of jumbled skulls, jaws, pelvic bones and thighbones, sometimes protruding from the porous rock as if someone had sought to give them a burial.

According to El Salvador's Human Rights Commission, a private organization, 11,860 civilians were murdered in the first nine months of this year. About half were peasants.

Abuses Called Isolated

The President of the country's military-civilian junta, Jose Napoleon Duarte, said in an interview last week that most of the human rights violations were isolated ''abuses of authority.'' And United States officials here have said that it is not the regular army, but what are known as the ''security forces'' - the National Guard, National Police and Treasury Police - that are responsible for most of the abuses. But the Archbishop Arturo Rivera Damas of San Salvador said that the army was killing civilians during its operations.

Radio Venceremos, the clandestine radio station of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, has reported numerous massacres, but the Salvadoran Government has routinely denied them. Last week, however, the Roman Catholic Church's Legal Aid office here issued a report that the army killed 78 civilians, including 19 women and 45 children under 16 years old, in an operation in late October on the San Vicente volcano, about 25 miles east of the capital. In addition, 65 civilians, including 44 children, were taken away by helicopter, according to the report, which lists the names and ages of all the victims.

To find El Playon, which is about 15 miles northwest of the capital, reporters are told to get on the paved road that bisects the lava field, then watch for the vultures.

''It scares me,'' said a 22-year-old peasant as he scavenged through a mound of garbage with the tip of his machete. Bodies' Existence Denied

Military spokesmen have denied the existence of the bodies at El Playon, and President Duarte said last week that the stories about the place had been invented by foreign journalists. But on Friday reporters found vultures feeding on eight more victims at El Playon. They had been shot in the head and were clothed as if they had been dragged from their beds.

Yesterday, after being told about the scene at El Playon by the United States Embassy, President Duarte ordered an investigation. Similarly, the Minister of Defense, Jose Guillermo Garcia, who returned from a trip to the United States two days ago, emphatically denied the existence of the bodies at El Playon when asked about it at a news conference today. He said the reports ''had no foundation'' and resulted from ''sensationalism'' by the international press. When told that numerous foreign correspondents had seen bodies at El Playon, Colonel Garcia said he was ordering an investigation.

Asked about the Legal Aid office's report of the killing of 78 civilians by the army at San Vicente, Colonel Garcia did not respond directly but disparaged the work of the office and accused it of using ''lies'' and ''calumny'' in its reports.

In a report about El Playon, the Human Rights Commission said that the killers ''are no less than the same security forces, members of the army and Paramilitary Patrols who operating as the so-called death squad tortured the victims before killing them.''

A Salvadoran who visits El Playon frequently and asked not to be further identified said that military units frequently travel on the road that passses El Playon. ''Nobody would dare to keep using this place to dump bodies if they were afraid of the army finding out or if any of the bodies belonged to soldiers or friends of soldiers,'' he said.

''The bodies of the assassinated and mutilated continue to turn up,'' Archbishop Rivera Damas said during his homily at mass a week ago. ''Painfully, this has become a tragic routine, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.''

''Contributing to this,'' he continued ''is the impunity with which the paramilitary death squads operate.'' Another priest said last week that in his area the death squads were the National Police while nearby they were the Treasury Police. Casualty Toll Is Down

In the spare Human Righs Commission office, cramped with simple desks, manual typewriters and documents, the man and woman trim the glossy black and white photographs of recent victims. On the cover of a photograph album, the kind that a family might buy, is a tranquil scene of a couple rowing on a deep blue lake beneath yellow and red fall foliage. Inside, under the clear plastic, are the pictures of November's dead.

A senior United States diplomat here said last week that the human rights situation was improving. And according to the Human Rights Commission, 654 civilians were killed in August and 498 in September, the lowest monthly totals for the year

''The fact that our numbers have gone down does not mean that repression has diminished,'' said a commission official. She added that part of the decline was attributable to the fact that the army and security forces are operating in remote rural areas, where it is more difficult to gather information.

Archbishop Rivera Damas told reporters that there had been weeks in which the number of civilians killed had declined but that in the first week of November a ''relatively high'' number of about 250 civilians were killed.